Web search goes mobile

Adoption of smartphones is growing. Smartphones enable users to run apps on the devices and also browse the internet. Internet search is used more and more often and is eclipsing search from PCs.

Bernstein research reported that in year 2015 amount of search queries submitted from mobile devices will be approximately the same, surpassing next year by 3%. Google reported that today 2/3 of the queries come from the iPhone. Another article confirms that even though Android dominates phone sales web browsing happens on the iPhone. This is a risky dependency for Google who’s mobile revenues reached $2.5 billion last year and on track to surpass $4 billion this year. The risk is that Apple may switch the iOS mobile operating system to default alternative search engine cutting Google’s mobile search revenues.

Mobile Apps vs. Mobile Web

There is a certain move towards HTML5 from the developer community. Benefits of uniform standard across the mobile platforms are obvious. Adobe is abandoning Flash Mobile. Silverlight’s future is in question as well. However, it will be up to the users to choose if they want to use the native apps or web apps. Flurry analytics published data on consumption of web vs. mobile apps. Starting June 2011 users prefer native apps based on the minutes spent.  

	Web (minutes per day)	Apps (minutes per day)
June 2011	74	81
Dec 2011	72	94

Users prefer apps to the web. I do not see how mobile platform owners: Google, Apple, Microsoft incentivized to move away from the apps towards web apps. Current business model where those companies take a cut from sold apps is too big to abandon.

While Android phones dominate market web browsing happens on iOS

NetMarketshare published report showing consistently around 50% of mobile web traffic coming from iOS (iPhone and iPad), while Android is in high teens.